Sunday, August 02, 2015, 5:30 p.m.

For movies, the January lull

January is traditionally a month for horror movies and straggling award-seeking foreign and independent movies in local theaters, and this week pretty much conforms to expectations.

The big news for moviegoers may be the arrival of Jacques Audiard’s modern melodrama Rust and Bone, a sexy subtitled beast starring the highly decorated Marion Cotillard and the up-and-coming Mathias Schoenearts.

But while our Philip Martin admits “there’s a lot to admire” in the movie, he’s ultimately underwhelmed by its the standard plot and it’s almost Rocky II-style resolution. It’s not bad, but it is something less than the sum of its parts.

And if you had high hopes for Mama, the Guillermo del Toro “presented” (not directed) film about feral children who skitter around their adoptive family’s homes like massive roaches, well, it pains us to inform you that our Piers Marchant has seen the film and reports that it “features dialogue that sounds as if it has been run through a Google translator, and is filled with the kind of time jumps and scene shifts so as to make it as easy as possible on the writers at the expense of even basic story logic.”

Not that that matters to some fans of spooky-ooky — just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

But just when you thought it was over, who saves the day but dear old Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose comeback film The Last Stand is — Dan Lybarger says — “a pleasant reminder of how he came to be a star in the first place.”

And the Mark Wahlberg-Russell Crowe crime drama Broken City didn’t screen for critics. You know what that (usually) means.